social media Archives - A Change Is Coming

12 Lessons from WT:Social

Growth has tapered off significantly on WT:Social, the news focused social network from Jimmy Wales of Wikipedia fame. Usability remains a huge problem. There’s a lot of spam and other noise. It’s still early days, and things may well improve over time, but it’s hard to be optimistic.

So now’s a good time to take a step back and look at what can be learned from the experience so far. Over the years, I’ve done posts like this with Mastodon, Diaspora, Google+, and other social networks. This time, I’m working on news focused social network software myself, so some of these lessons are likely to be especially relevant for me.

To start with, here’s a few I discussed in my 2017 Mastodon post (where I noted “we’ve seen them before with Dreamwidth, Diaspora, StatusNet, Gnu Social, Pinboard, Ello, and others”) that are worth reiterating once again:

A lot of people want an alternative to corporate-owned ad-funded social networks.
A small team of developers can get something usable out quickly.
There’s interest across the world, not just in the U.S.

Moving on to some new lessons ….

People like the idea of working together to help fight disinformation. Perhaps the most encouraging takeaway from the WT:Social experience so far is that a lot of people understand that disinformation is a problem — want to help do something about it. True, WT:Social’s “everybody can edit anything” approach doesn’t work well; no surprises there. Still, it’s worth exploring other approaches involving more nuanced collaboration between paid professionals and “the crowd” (with training available, and perhaps some kind of Slashdot-like meta-moderation), all assisted by solid tools. [1]
There’s a good opportunity for a “better reddit”. Jimmy positioned WT:Social as a Facebook alternative, but as I discussed in Why is an “intellectual dark web” site at the top of my feed? , it’s currently more like reddit … and that’s not a bad thing! On many topics, reddit’s links are mediocre (or worse) and provide very limited perspectives. reddit discussions are often toxic. And while there are alternatives with some traction to Facebook and Twitter (MeWe and Mastodon both have millions of users), none of them have the same news focus as reddit.
Design and usability are key. People understand that a new site won’t be as polished as reddit or Facebook, but if it’s too confusing they generally won’t invite their friends [2] — and are likely to stop coming back. WT:Social would have been better off starting with less functionality (did they really need hashtags right off the bat?) and putting more attention on design and usability.
Help people have good initial experiences. My first impression of WT:Social included getting asked for money, seeing off-topic links that happened to be at the top of the default subwikis at the time, and then getting spam in my email. Hooray! And pity the new user who found stuff confusing: for quite a while, there was no easy way of asking for help or finding the FAQ. Fortunately, it’s not hard to improve “first use experiences” through techniques like better design, simple onboarding screens, and easy access to resources and support. [3]
Focus on accessibility up front or it will be a problem. WT:Social is a horrible experience using a screen-reader, and has many blatant accessibility bugs like missing alt-text and low color contrast that free site analyzers like Axe and WAVE can detect. Many other social networks also don’t do a great job here either, so there’s a big opportunity for a new offering to distinguish itself and a large audience of people whose needs aren’t being met today.
Focus on harassment up front or it will be a problem. WT:Social is filled with mechanisms that are optimized for harassers, doesn’t allow muting or blocking, and doesn’t even make it easy to find the code of conduct or anti-harassment policy. Similarly, Wikipedia, Diaspora, Google+, Mastodon, and Twitter didn’t pay attention to harassment up-front, with the expected results. Y’know, it doesn’t have to be this way.
Think about how different cultural norms and legal systems will interact, including difficult areas relating to content that different people view as art, “porn”, and/or “NSFW”. There are opportunities for innovation here: Mastodon worked through some similar issues, and came up with interesting techniques like tailorable content warnings and a mechanism to deal with images that are legal in some geographies but not others.
Design for everybody, not just the kind of people the founder usually interacts with. Lessons #3-7 are all examples of this (and I talked about another one, the term “subwiki”, in a previous post).[4] I’ve made the same mistake myself. Fortunately, it’s not hard to do better: work with a broad range of people, including those who are marginalized in different ways than you, from the very beginning — and listen to their ideas, suggestions, and feedback.
Consider building on an existing discussion platform instead of rolling your own. WT:Social’s initial discussion mechanism was pretty basic, and even after a couple of months of enhancements the lack of notifications can make it hard to have a good discussion there. Does it make sense to leverage existing open-source commenting platforms like Coral Project or forum software like Discourse, NodeBB, or Vanilla Forums?
Consider leveraging open standards based on decentralized identity and verifiable credentials. Decentralized architectures are more complex but also a much better match for the real world. Credit for this one goes to Kaliya Young (aka IdentityWoman) on Twitter, where she also provided some links to reading material.
There’s a big opportunity for anti-oppressive social networks in general. Today’s large social networks welcome racists, misogynists, alt-righters, and other bigots; Facebook goes even farther, siding with authoritarians and promoting genocide. Most emerging alternatives either appeal even more blatantly to fascists (gab.ai) or strive for “neutrality” (WT:Social, MeWe, Minds). [5] Dreamwidth continues to be a shining exception, and Mastodon’s early positioning as “Twitter without Nazis” is another (and there’s a lot to be learned from its challenges). Still it’s clear that here’s a very large under-served market here.
It’s time for a different approach. What would a news focused social media site look like if it were grounded in design justice and built on best practices and research into anti-harassment, content moderation, online extremism, and amplifying marginalized voices? It’s hard to know, because there aren’t any high-profile examples of this. Seems like an opportunity to me!

One of the things that really struck me as I was working on this list is really striking about WT:Social is how they’ve repeated a lot of mistakes other social networks (including Wikipedia) have made. But even though WT:Social hasn’t taken advantage of its opportunities to learn from other social networks, other social networks can learn from WT:Social.

I’m sure there are other good lessons as well – or aspects of these I’ve overlooked. If you’ve have thoughts, please share them!

Thanks to Deborah, Eve, and everybody else who gave feedback on earlier versions of this post!

[1] As I was working on this post, I stumbled on Amy X Zhang’s thesis, which has some intriguing ideas and prototypes on the tools front. Starbird et. al.’s paper on disinformation as collaborative work, is also relevant. How to apply collaborative approaches to countering disinformation?

[2] The responses to Jimmy’s recent Why Inviting Friends Is Important highlight this.

[3] Indeed, WT:Social has recently made some progress here, thanks to Linda Blanchard’s excellent work on the Beginner’s Guide subwiki.

[4] Another example: the way new users automatically follow Jimmy Wales. Jimmy’s said that this is done to make it more convenient for him to broadcast messages for everybody on the site … but there are plenty of other ways to accomplish this. I get it that Jimmy wants to share the news when Rush’s drummer dies or a Turkish court rules in favor of Wikipedia, but it’s a classic case of assuming that users who haven’t expressed an interest in classic rock or Wikipedia share share his interests.

[5] I talked at length about “neutrality” in WT:Social will have to pick a side. Jimmy’s comment in the discussion on WT:Social is illuminating: he thinks people are “yearning” for technology that “fosters the kind of social activity that promotes truth and civil discourse.” For more on why “civility” is so problematic, see what Ijeoma Oluo, Jamilah Lemieux, Kitanya Harrison, @sassycrass, and @AngryBlackLady have to say about it.

Where are Black Women’s Voices in the Rolling Stone “Russian Troll” Story?

It’s great to see the recent surge of media interest on disinformation and the 2020 election. Errin Haines’ Manipulation Machines and Whitney Phillips’ The Toxins We Carry are two good examples. Disappointingly, a recent Rolling Stone story with a clickbait headline has gotten a lot more exposure so far than either of these: over 60,000 shares on Facebook. While the article makes some good points, it also has some major problems — starting with a complete erasure of Black women.

‘‘Erasure’’ refers to the ways the media (and more generally society) ignores the existence and contribution of some people and groups. Moya Bailey and Trudy (aka @thetrudz) give an example in On misogynoir: citation, erasure, and plagiarism: despite coining the term misogynoir, and writing about it for years they experience, to varying degrees,

our contributions being erased, our writing not cited, or our words plagiarized by people who find the word compelling.

Another example: the Rolling Stone article doesn’t quote, cite, or even mention any Black women — even though it focuses on disinformation campaigns involving fake accounts claiming to be Black women, a topic that (rather unsurprisingly) Black women have been dealing with and developing expertise in for a very long time.

As a result, the article ignores techniques that Black women have successfully used to identify and combat this kind of disinformation. Instead, the Rolling Stone article presents a recommendation with obvious flaws: it won’t work to reduce Russian disinformation, and it’s harmful to Black women.

Erasure of Black women is far too common, on this topic and many others. So before we delve into the Rolling Stone article, I want to highlight a surprisingly easy and straightforward way to help you notice it.

Be very skeptical about any article that doesn’t include Black women with expertise.

I’ll expand on this suggestion with some additional techniques at the end of this article, after looking at the erasure in more detail, and briefly discussing one of the other problems it leads to. First, though, let’s start with the Rolling Stone article’s positive aspects.

In That Uplifting Tweet You Just Shared? A Russian Troll Sent It, authors Darren Linvill and Patrick Warren highlight the threat of disinformation. The article does a good job of showing how “professional trolls” like Russia’s IRA start by building trust by sharing tweets and links their target audience agrees with, before mixing in disinformation. As Linvill and Warren say,

Effective disinformation is embedded in an account you agree with

This isn’t a new observation. Shireen Mitchell’s 2018 report How The Facebook Ads that Targeted Voters Centered on Black American Culture, for example, similarly notes the IRA’s initial ads were “designed to build a trusted community of Black and Latino voters” before pivoting to focus on digital voter suppression, a topic she continues to focus on in her ongoing work. Still, it’s a very important point, and one that a lot of people tend not to think about.

It’s easy to assume that just because an account is tweeting things you agree with, it’s on the same side as you are … but that’s not always the case. Don’t trust a Twitter account just because it’s got some good tweets.

The Rolling Stone article’s examples, both of fake accounts impersonating Black women, highlight another valuable takeaway. Of course, accounts of any race and gender can be faked and used for disinformation, so it would have been helpful to include some other examples as well; Linvill’s explanation of why they didn’t (in response to a question from Sabaah Folayan) is, as he admits, unsatisfying. Still, as the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report discusses, Black Americans were the group targeted the most by Russian social media efforts in 2016, and they’re still doing it.

So it’s important to be aware that “impersonation” is one of the techniques manipulators use.

Again, though, this isn’t a new observation. For example, impersonating Black women was discussed in

l’Nasah Crockett’s earlier Model View Culture article “Raving Amazons”: Antiblackness and Misogynoir in Social Media back in 2014.
Rachelle Hampton’s The black feminists behind #YourSlipIsShowing, a campaign against Twitter trolls masquerading as women of color on Slate in 2018 following, with perspectives from Crockett and Safiqah Hudson
Shireen Mitchell’s Twitter Moment Hacking of 2016 would have never happened had folk #ListenedToBW, which connects the dots by relating it to Russian election meddling.

Which brings us back to the erasure. None of this previous work is quoted or cited in the Rolling Stone article. No actual Black women are mentioned. The only hints of Black women’s existence in the article are the fake accounts used as examples.

One consequence of this erasure shows up when the discussion turns to how to combat this kind of disinformation. The Rolling Stone article doesn’t even discuss the techniques which Black women have been developing and refining for years. The authors instead suggest teaching “digital civility.”

As @sassycrass points out on Twitter:

Hey, you know what ISN’T the issue here? Civility. How could it be? Per this SAME piece, trolls are GREAT at mimicking semi-civil discourse.

Conversely, as Black women including Ijeoma Oluo, Jamilah Lemieux, Kintanya Harrison, @sassycrass, @AngryBlackLady, and many others have noted, “civility” is a club that’s often used to attack Black women and other people of color. One way this plays out on Twitter, Facebook, and other social networks is that dissenting voices, particularly those of people of color, are routinely dismissed as Russian bots or trolls.

So the authors’ suggestion of “digital civility” as a remedy to disinformation isn’t just unhelpful. It actively aids the Russians in their goal of stoking racial dissent. It’s a good example of a point that Shireen Mitchell and Whitney Phillips discussed last month: when discussing disinformation, white journalists who don’t face the same daily threats as people of color:

tend to add to the harms because they are not affected by it but also don’t know the nuances enough to tell the story effectively.

Unless you’re an expert in disinformation techniques, you probably weren’t aware of the previous work that Black women have done on this front — it hasn’t received very much media attention. As Manipulation Machines points out, too many journalists aren’t connected to the communities where this work is being done and discussed, so they tend not to write about it.

Still, you don’t need to be an expert to notice that Black women weren’t mentioned in an article about impersonating Black women. Here’s three straightforward techniques have helped me a lot.

Always look to see whether an article includes perspectives from Black women with expertise. If not, think twice before sharing it, and be very skeptical about any recommendations it makes. Instead, look for other related articles that are by Black women, or at least include Black women’s perspectives.
Listen to what Black women are saying about an article before amplifying it. If they have critiques, amplify the critiques rather than the article.

Fortunately there are journalists who do feature the work of Black women. So here’s a few additional suggestions:

Seek out perspectives from Black women. Read (and support!) publications that feature their work. Buy their books. Follow them on social media. The people I’ve mentioned and linked to here are all great starting points; Imani Gandy’s Fems of Color list is another.
When somebody else shares a link that erases Black women, point it out, and provide alternate links.
Look at the links you’ve shared, and the links that have been shared to your group. How many are by Black women? How many include Black women’s perspectives? Set a goal of sharing as many artciles by Black women as by white men, and as many articles including Black women’s perspectives as white men’s perspectives.

It’s also worth highlighting that there’s often the same pattern of erasure and disinformation with other perspectives that are usually marginalized. So it’s worth rereading the bullet points above, and whenever you see “Black women”, also think about how these suggestions apply to trans, queer, and non-binary people, disabled people, and other groups that are often both erased and targeted with disinformation.

I certainly do agree with the authors of the Rolling Stone article that dealing with disinformation being created and distributed with the skill that foreign and domestic actors have today is new ground for most of us. Digital voter suppression focused on Black voters is going to be a key battleground in the 2020 campaign. As Shireen Mitchell recently said on Facebook, discussing her appearance on Joy Reid’s MSNBC show: